


which one are you now?

by chexheir (orphan_account)



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Canon Compliant- Dangan Ronpa 3, Dream Sequence, Freeform, Gen, Hinata Hajime Swears, Hinata Hajime and Kamukura Izuru Are Merged, Hinata Hajime-centric, I did my best, I have no idea what I'm doing, Identity Issues, Kamukura Izuru Has Feelings, Kamukura Izuru-centric, Post-Super Dangan Ronpa 2, Pre-Dangan Ronpa 3, Super Dangan Ronpa 2 Spoilers, Swearing, background characters die but it's glossed over because i didn't want to write gore, i do not know how to write summaries, i don't know how to write, i don't really like how i ended this but it needed an ending so, i have adhd and i'm here to project, i really hope this makes sense but it might not, i refuse to believe the Despair arc is canon even though this fic is compliant with it, it's like memories in a dream idk, its not really relevant and he's in denial but he does, kazuichi hyperfocuses because i said so, kazuichi provides comfort at the end bc i thought hajime needed it, oh also i razed a random city for fun, so does hajime, sort of??, unfortunately
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:29:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28886142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/chexheir
Summary: hajime's dreams take him through some memories, and some identity issues.
Relationships: Hinata Hajime & Chiaki Nanami (past), Hinata Hajime & Kamukura Izuru, Hinata Hajime & Soda Kazuichi
Comments: 1
Kudos: 27





	which one are you now?

**Author's Note:**

> i'm a bit nervous about posting this but i wrote it and it might as well go somewhere!!! thanks to my friend who beta read this for me despite not knowing anything about Danganronpa beyond what I've told her, and who called Izuru a bastard about five times consecutively in the comments. the ending section is mostly still there because of her instant love for Kazuichi.

In front of him, awash in the same crimson light that covered the world most days, was what remained of Inuyama. The ground was covered with rubble; chunks of stone, wooden planks, and other debris had been ripped from where they had once formed the city’s skyline, and now made up a carpet of shrapnel beneath his feet. Each of his steps crunched softly as he made his way through the desiccated corpse. A place where people had very recently lived— the overpowering smell of iron indicated that the city had failed to evacuate before the attack.

The mangled bodies peeking out from under the rubble corroborated this story. 

A little voice in the back of his mind told him something was off about this scene, but it wouldn’t tell him what it was— so he ignored it.

Izuru Kamukura did not care about the people anymore than he did their possessions, or their garbage, or anything else that lay buried beneath the pieces of the city. In a few places, buildings remained partially standing where a small piece of a wall had stood steadfast rather than crumble; in a few places, people still lived, desperately trying to fight against a collapsed roof that had pinned them down, or a wound that had incapacitated without killing. The people would die, and the walls would either fall to future damage, or simply erode away without assistance. Anything that managed to survive would do it without Kamukura’s assistance. If the almost impossible odds were overcome, it might be interesting enough to sate the seemingly unending boredom that ate away at him, day after day— but it only even had the possibility to be interesting without that interference. 

Normally, he couldn’t have cared less about how the former members of class 77-B chose to spread despair. Normally, it would have been interesting enough to him that he hadn’t seen this bombing coming that he would have investigated what had happened, solved it, and then moved on. But this wasn’t normally; this time, he was here for a reason, and Inuyama’s destruction did not align with his goal. A decimated city was not enough to prevent him from achieving it anyway, but it did mean he had to put in more work than he otherwise would have, and he did not appreciate the additional hindrance. He supposed there must’ve been some sort of lack of foresight on his part, to not have seen this coming. He couldn’t figure out what it could’ve been, though. Even if he’d tried to avoid knowledge of the other Ultimate Despairs’ activities, it would’ve taken actually living under a rock to have a chance of success. Kamukura was certain he’d been keeping tabs on Kazuichi just the same as he always had been; so what had changed? 

The feeling that something was wrong returned, even stronger than before— but Kamukura pushed it away again. If he couldn’t identify it, then it couldn’t have been important. 

He paused and took a deep breath, brushing a strand of long black hair out of his face. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen the other Despairs in person; likely they had just changed somewhat, and he would have to adjust his predictions to match. It didn’t make sense, of course, but it was the most likely explanation. None of his predictions since entering Inuyama had been wrong; even the building that had almost fallen on him on his way in had been something he’d seen coming, and everything from that to now had gone exactly as expected. It was an issue that could wait for another day, until after he’d gotten what he’d come for. 

The strength and radius of the bomb should’ve been just outside of the range that would’ve caused any significant damage to his destination. Should’ve been. And yet, even before he closed the last of the distance, he had seen a thick plume of smoke rising to mix with a sky filled with blood and ashes, and he had known. Izuru Kamukura did not deny the obvious. But Izuru Kamukura also wasn’t wrong. And to see evidence that he had been, right in front of his face?

This time, the thought came, and he could not push it away. Something was wrong here. What was wrong here? There was something…

And then it clicked; this wasn’t how it had gone. 

What had he even thought he’d been there for in the first place? No, Inuyama was destroyed, but he hadn’t simply walked in after the fact and been annoyed about it. He’d played an entirely different role when the actual event had happened, which had been quite some time ago. Everything made sense now. Izuru Kamukura was never wrong, but that rule applied because he understood the ways things worked, and nothing entirely followed its normal rules in a dream. He was dreaming. 

And the moment he had that thought, it was like the whole world shifted. 

He’d lucid dreamed before. Usually he realized he was dreaming much sooner than this. He could control what he dreamed after that, of course, but to steer where his mind went completely was painfully boring. Letting the dream coast along its course and tweaking it where it could benefit only was his typical strategy. Even though he’d now realized he was dreaming, though, something still didn’t quite add up. There was still a niggling thought lodged in the back of his mind that he could not quite force to the front. Kamukura had stopped walking upon seeing the plume of smoke before, but now he continued his walk towards the destination he’d been moving towards before. It was more than just following to see where his mind would take him this time. Something in this dream had thrown him off, and now he wanted to know what. 

And yet the place he arrived at simply seemed to be yet another smoking pile of rubble. A brief scan of the mess in front of him informed him that it had been some sort of office building, completely and utterly uninteresting in its uniformity. Crouching down down and sifting through it revealed much the same results; absolutely nothing of interest. A broken picture frame, now empty; a stress ball; paperwork; all the things you’d see if you Googled “office” and went into images. Kamukura stood back up, giving the building’s remains a slight glare. If there were no answers here, he certainly didn’t know where to find them. He turned around to walk away— and then noticed something out of the corner of his eye. Kamukura walked back over, and found he was staring at himself, courtesy of a shard of mirror half-buried in the rubble.

Two sharp red eyes looked back at him from his reflection. His suit and hair were neat as always, except for where his hair had trailed on the ground; he decided it should be shorter to avoid that, and the dream complied. 

The dream complied a little too much, actually. Somehow, his hair ended up above his shoulders. This hadn’t been what he meant to do. He should—

Wait. He stared at himself in the mirror, and this time, he remembered. Of course something had still felt off! He was what was off! 

Because he wasn’t Izuru Kamukura; he was Hajime Hinata. 

This time, the thought made the world spin. 

And it did not want to stop spinning. He was in his classroom at Hope’s Peak— he was in front of the fountain where he had met Chiaki Nanami— he was back in his old classroom, from before Hope’s Peak— 

The sound of the ocean filled his ears, and Hajime opened his eyes to find himself laying on a beach. He sat up, blinking, and then gave his head a good shake to make sure there wasn’t any sand in his hair. How had he gotten here? He couldn’t quite remember, but it didn’t feel important. He’d fallen asleep on the beach, and now he’d woken up; he should go and check on the others. Had he put on sunscreen before falling asleep? His skin didn’t look or feel sunburned, so he supposed he must’ve. That was good, at least. Hajime slowly pushed himself up to his feet, ignoring how the weight of exhaustion attempted to pull him down still. He went to brush sand off of his clothes before setting off, and then paused, frowning. There wasn’t any sand on his clothes. Shouldn’t there have been sand on his clothes? No, wait, that was right; he’d been lying down on his back, so that’s where the sand would be. Well, he wasn’t going to worry about that. He had more important things to be doing than napping or thinking about sand. It was time to go and check on his friends. 

There was a creeping feeling of wrongness about his current situation that Hajime was determined to ignore. Things had just felt weird lately. This was normal. 

The issue with having a whole five islands for five people was that it made it very difficult to track down the others sometimes. They all still met up for breakfast at the hotel every morning, just like they had in the simulation, but judging by the sun, it was currently mid-afternoon, which meant that wasn’t particularly helpful at the moment. He set off to begin searching. Your best bet on where to find someone else was always the building the Neo-World Program had been set up in; he didn’t think there had been a single time since the survivors had woken up where there hadn’t been at least one person there. Even at night, he’d often run into one of the others there. To be fair, though, nobody on the islands had been on the best terms with sleep since the program, and it didn’t seem like their relationships with it were going to be improving for a while. He couldn’t remember if he’d had a dream while on the beach, which he supposed was a good thing; none of his dreams had been particularly pleasant, recently. 

He stepped onto the bridge between the first island and the center island, still somewhat lost in his own head. Hajime didn’t like how quiet it had been on the islands since the Neo-World Program, honestly. He’d been doing his best to keep busy, to try and keep his mind off of how empty everything was, but— he didn’t know. It hadn’t been working very well, for whatever reason. Had he even been really accomplishing anything? Probably nothing that the others couldn’t have gotten done themselves. ...Was that right? Was that really what he’d been doing? It didn’t feel right. He was sure it wasn’t important. 

Sand crunched under his foot— wait, hadn’t he just been on the bridge? He was on the second island now, he realized. How had that happened? He paused, then shook his head slightly. Things had been weird since the killing game had ended. He’d probably just been too lost in thought. That seemed like a reasonable enough explanation, right?

Something didn’t quite feel right, still, but that was normal— hadn’t he grown used to things not quite making sense?

The building that housed their comatose friends loomed in front of him, imposing as ever. He walked inside. He wasn’t going to be intimidated by a building, even if it was a particularly intimidating building. 

The hallway leading to the pods was long, empty, and quiet, his footsteps against the metal floor providing the only noise beyond a soft mechanical hum that pervaded the entire building. Unlike the rest of the islands, this was a familiar quiet; he’d gotten used to being with the rest of his friends on Jabberwock in the simulation, and he expected them to be there still, sometimes. Their absence created a silence that didn’t suit the atmosphere of the tropical islands. It just made everything feel fake.

For some reason, that final thought stood out to him. But it wasn’t important right now. He just wanted to see one of his friends, and be reassured that he wasn’t alone, right now.

The silence belonged in this building, though. It was a solemn place, for waiting, and resting, and working. To hear anything more would’ve felt strange, he thought, finally reaching the end of the hallway, and pushing open the door. 

Huh. That was strange. It didn’t seem like anyone else was there. Maybe they were just out of view, behind the computer terminal in the center of the room? His pace slowed significantly as he approached, feeling his heart thump in his chest for reasons he could not quite explain, and wondered if there was really a chance someone else would be there and not have acknowledged him by now. Maybe they were just really caught up in their own thoughts, the rational part of his brain offered, and he quickly moved to accept it, but—

Wait. 

He turned to look at the pods next to him, to actually _look_ at them, for the first time.

And the only thing he saw was his own reflection. Two soft green eyes, spikey chestnut hair, the same green tie he always wore, all of it tinted greener by the green glass it was on— nobody inside the pod. Nobody inside any of the pods.

Had he somehow completed World Destroyer and forgotten it? No, that was ridiculous— even if he had, it would’ve taken him being asleep for days to miss _everyone_ waking up, after all—

Wait. World Destroyer? Right. World Destroyer, the A.I. he’d— no, it couldn’t have been him, he didn’t know how to do something like that— except he did, and he had, and—

Hajime found himself leaning against the pod in front of him with one hand, and clutching his head with the other as the world spun around him, faster and faster. No, this wasn’t right. None of it was right. Why was nothing making sense? 

Oh. He was dreaming, wasn’t he?

_(But hadn’t he just been dreaming?)_

The world snapped back into place, sending him tumbling forwards. 

Instead of colliding with machinery that had just been in front of him, he found himself falling into air. He caught himself just before he fell completely over, then paused to process what had just happened. The ground in front of him was no longer metal, but a pattern of cobblestone. The soft hum and whir of machinery had been replaced by the splashing of water. He had his suspicions about where he was at that point, and standing upright and looking around confirmed them; he was back at Hope’s Peak Academy, by the fountain where he’d met Nanami. He missed her. The A.I. they’d met inside the Neo-World Program had been his friend, too, but the Nanami he’d known in real life had been different. He supposed he missed both of them. He walked over and sat down on the bench in front of the fountain, and stared out at the empty campus of Hope’s Peak, trying to remember more about the Ultimate Gamer.

He couldn’t remember much. Just like the rest of his memories, he could only summon up a few specific occasions, and they were accompanied by stark few details. He’d met her here the first time. He’d recognized the game she was playing— Gala Omega, he thought? A.I. Chiaki had been wearing a Gala Omega pin, and he was fairly certain they’d looked the same, so it was probably Gala Omega. He remembered how she’d looked when she smiled, he thought. Or maybe that was how the A.I. had smiled, and he just remembered how it had made him feel. He was fairly certain they’d met up in front of the fountain and played games together. He didn’t remember any of it, really, but that felt right. His only other specific memory of her was of the last time he’d seen her. She’d said she would see him tomorrow. She hadn’t. She’d never seen him again, actually. The thought made his chest feel hollow, like there was something heavy weighing him, down all of the sudden. 

He wondered what had become of her. 

He knew what had become of her.

...He did?

Oh, shit. He did.

It came back to him, sharp, sudden, and harsh. The dream world around him snapped into a different place. A place with cold, hard, checkered tiles. A place with a monitor showing Nanami in a maze of death traps, dodging, and failing to dodge. 

A place where Nanami, who’d just been impaled, lay bleeding out in front of him.

But he wasn’t Hajime Hinata anymore. He was Izuru Kamukura. And Izuru Kamukura had all of the skills required to save her, but none of the drive, and none of the empathy. She spoke to him. About wanting to play games with him, “ _just one last time”_ , and his heart ached, dully, somewhere outside of the memory he’d been thrust into. Her blood was so stark against the tiles. She was struggling, dying— but Kamukura simply watched. He looked on with mild interest, and made idle conversation with the girl bleeding out on the floor in front of him, and did nothing at all to help.

He might as well have killed her. He never would have done it directly, of course, because he so rarely acted directly. But he’d allowed it to happen. 

The rest of the memory faded out, and Hajime found himself suddenly thrust into his old desk in the reserve course, breathing heavily. He didn’t think he was used to having dreams like this. He was fairly certain that this was _far_ more vivid than he was used to. He couldn’t remember. It occurred to him that he couldn’t remember most things about himself. Maybe he was just still reeling from the image of Chiaki dying, of the nightmare of standing in front of her and doing nothing, but he didn’t feel particularly surprised to realize that. It was like it made perfect sense that he would have forgotten most of his life. 

After all, it did make perfect sense— his memories of being Hajime Hinata had been removed as part of the process of making him into Izuru Kamukura. 

The dream jolted, as had now become the pattern, and Kamukura surveyed a damaged Towa City from his position on its rooftops. This was the Towa City he had seen when he had been there for the A.I. chips containing Alter-Ego Junko; marks from battles that had been fought there marred its every surface, but it continued to cling to life. There were a few notable differences between the version that had manifested in his dreamscape and the one he had actually seen. For one thing, the city was notably devoid of any living inhabitants. Other than the corpses and dying he could catch sight of below him, he appeared to be the only living thing in the faux Towa City of his mind. The tallest point of the city still stood here, as well, unlike its mostly destroyed real world counterpart. Even from a distance, he could tell it had still been somewhat damaged, but far more of it was intact. 

He wasn’t sure why he was playing spot-the-difference with his subconscious and the various husks of ruined cities it chose to throw at him, but he was beginning to lose interest. Even if everything followed actual logic, logical answers didn’t mean much in a dream, where none of the normal rules applied. He would simply remember the dream when he awoke, and analyze it then, once he had seen enough to fully make sense of his subconscious. There was no point in this trip down a distorted memory lane. He...

He stopped, interrupting his own train of thought. And frowned. Did any of what he’d just thought even make any actual sense? There wasn’t any logic behind his desire to stop dreaming this. He just... didn’t want to be in this city anymore. Kamukura realized, with an intensity of emotion he had not often felt, that he really and truly did not want anything _less_ than to be in this alternate Towa City, to an extent that he knew was entirely irrational, but failed to shake off anyway. He could try and figure out what exactly was causing this feeling later; he was sure the answer was in the back of his mind somewhere, but the only thing he could focus on in that moment was the desire to be out, to be away from that city, to be anywhere— well, not anywhere, but close to it— else. 

Luckily, this was a dream. All he had to do was close his eyes for a moment, and he could will himself away to wherever he chose. An easy way out. It didn’t even matter to him where he ended up, as long as it wasn’t here. 

When he opened his eyes, the surge of relief that followed was far too strong to be a rational response to the sight of a half-destroyed neighborhood in front of him. For a moment, he didn’t even care that he couldn’t make sense of his emotions. He was just glad to be out. Which, of course, was entirely unlike him. 

Kamukura wondered if he had hit his head the previous day. He couldn’t remember the recent events of his actual life, which he attributed to some strange quirk of dreaming, so it was also entirely possible this was some sort of fever dream. Neither explanation felt entirely correct, but either would have explained some things. 

He began to walk along the street he’d found himself on. Some of the buildings still stood most of the way upright, but while few had been completely obliterated, none remained completely unscathed. Bricks, paper, wood, and all manner of things littered the ground. Much of the destruction that had immediately followed in the wake of the Tragedy was simply random violence directed at the closest target. Kamukura doubted there’d been much real reason to provoke this area’s change from a communal environment to the war zone it had turned into, but he still felt that he should’ve predicted what had happened. Maybe he had predicted it, and had simply shoved the thought into a different corner of his mind, to think about once Enoshima was finished with her goals. It shouldn’t have mattered to him, really. He’d found some answers in the wreckage that had awaited him regardless. But he’d still wondered what he could’ve learned from them, sometimes. 

Kamukura stood in front of the building that had once been the home of someone he no longer was. It was nobody’s home, now. The windows had been shattered, the door had been smashed in, and there were spots of soot and damage from fires both inside and out. It was small, unobtrusive, and just as average as the boy who had lived in it had supposedly been. If he hadn’t known the address, if he hadn’t been looking for it, he never would have given it a second glance. 

He carefully stepped around the remains of the door, and entered the house.

The entryway was littered with shards of glass, and the scattered shoes of the inhabitants, who’d no doubt expected to have a perfectly average day, completely oblivious to the events that awaited them. Nobody else who had entered the house had bothered with such courtesies. He continued in a similar fashion.

Kamukura wasn’t sure why he was there, this time. He was certain he’d seen everything there was to see the first time, and even if he had missed anything, his mind would not be able to recreate anything he could not already predict the existence of. But it felt the right thing to do, so it was what he did. 

He walked past a room with a broken television and the body of a middle-aged man who had been suffocated to death with a cushion. He stepped around the shards of vase that littered the floor, and ignored the fake plant that had inhabited it. The next room held the body of Hinata’s mother, who had been stabbed with one of those shards. In the room after that, Hinata’s father had been killed with a baseball bat. He wondered how much they had known about the Kamukura Project. They must’ve signed their own consent forms, because Hinata had not been old enough for his signature alone to be adequate, but he hadn’t bothered to check what details they had been given about it before he’d left Hope’s Peak. Kamukura regretted that, now, although he wasn’t quite sure why. None of the results would have been changed by his knowing, after all.

He came to a stop in the doorway of a room with a kicked in door. A room with manga volumes scattered on the floor, a Hope’s Peak Academy poster torn halfway off the wall, a participation award that lay broken in front of the bookshelf, and dozens of other minuscule details that made it unmistakably the bedroom of a painfully average teenaged boy. Kamukura had been underwhelmed and utterly unsurprised by what he had found in the real version of the room. There was no reason to believe that this would be different. 

But there’d been no reason to believe he could find answers in the ransacked and trashed home of a dead boy to begin with, and he’d still checked then, so he walked over to Hinata’s mostly intact desk anyway. There was a small black picture frame that had been knocked forwards laying on it. The discrepancy with the splintered desk he’d found in reality, and the photo frame that had been sent all the way under the bed in the chaos, were the only things that drew him to it. A curiosity about why just this part had changed. He didn’t know what had been inside the picture frame in real life, or if anything even had; it had been shattered and empty when he’d found it, and leaving a picture frame for a record of some future grand success seemed like the kind of thing someone like Hinata would do. 

There was no reason for the moment of hesitation before he reached over and propped the frame up, but it was there. 

Glass shards fell onto the desk, as he had expected. Just as it was shattered in life, it was shattered in the dream. But this time, there was a picture staring back at him. He picked up the frame and gently, carefully, removed the photograph. 

It was a small photo of Hinata with his mother and father, likely taken not that many years before he had gone to Hope’s Peak, that showed them all far happier than Kamukura had seen any reason to believe they were. And he couldn’t quite understand it, somehow.

Hajime was holding the photo from his desk in his hands. He couldn’t remember when it had been taken, but he knew that he’d been genuinely happy. His parents had taken him somewhere, and for a day, it had just been... nice. He didn’t think they’d always gotten along very well, but for that day, they had. He went to put it back in the frame, because that just felt like the right thing to do, and then realized the frame was sitting on the desk in front of him, shattered. Thrown out of his momentary lapse, Hajime fully registered the room around him for the first time.

It looked like it’d been ransacked. It probably _had_ been ransacked, actually. Possessions were thrown about the floor as if a tornado had gone through, and the bookshelf, chair, and dresser had all taken significant damage. He took a step backwards and almost slid to the floor on a manga he’d stepped on. He probably should’ve felt horrified, but he didn’t. From what he’d learned, this was about normal within the areas that had been affected by the Tragedy— which was most areas. It made sense that he’d dream of what he expected to see from the Tragedy, seeing as it was impossible to avoid thinking about it. He carefully folded the photo of his family and put it in the pocket of his shirt. The only thing that struck him as confusing about finding himself here was the odd sense of familiarity he felt. Like he had been here before. He didn’t think he had, but maybe the reason he’d found a photograph of himself there had been more than strange dream logic. 

There was a poster on the wall that someone had ripped a large strip of the middle out of. Even with the gap, it was clearly a poster showing Hope’s Peak Academy. He felt... kind of sad to see it like that, in spite of all the terrible things the school had done. Or maybe it was just that the poster seemed special, somehow. Almost like it was familiar. It seemed like the exact sort of thing he would’ve bought and put up in his own room, after all.

Wait. Was this his room?

He looked around the small bedroom, desperately looking for some kind of identifying detail, as if anything a dream could provide would truly work as any sort of proof. How could he dream a room he’d forgotten in such vivid detail? Was there a possibility he’d remembered it? But he couldn’t picture what the room would look like if it was in proper order, either, and even if it felt familiar... It was more of a sensation of déjà vu than a memory, really. He couldn’t be sure of anything right now, it seemed. 

The door to the room, Hajime realized, had evidently been kicked down; judging by what he could see immediately outside his doorway, the rest of the house was in a similar state of disarray. He walked across the broken door, and out into the hallway. Maybe he could find something else in the house that he could remember, to help him place whether this had been where he’d lived or not. 

There were pieces of furniture and shattered glass everywhere. Yeah. the house had definitely been ransacked. It felt more like something out of a horror movie than an actual building. He wondered if the reason he felt so detached and calm was because he couldn’t entirely wrap his head around the idea that this was the state of the world just yet. Logically, he understood it. But emotionally, it was a lot harder for him to really register. He peeked into the nearest room.

And saw—

Oh, fuck.

Hajime tried to shut the door, realized it was broken, and then just put his back against the hallway wall, breathing heavily. Blood. A baseball bat, covered in blood. Again. For a third time. Sato, Mahiru, and now, his father. 

He wanted to check the rest of the rooms far less now. If his father was there, it was probably his house. That had probably been his room. 

He was slightly less upset about all of that than he felt like he should’ve been.

The next room he checked held the body of his mom. Hajime had expected it, but that didn’t make it any less distressing. Didn’t stop his heart rate from increasing, his hands from shaking, his feet from stumbling backwards, his world from beginning to spin, to blur, to—

Kamukura was in the trial room Enoshima set up beneath Hope’s Peak Academy. The room where he’d watched as Nanami bled out in front of him. The room where he’d cried tears that both couldn’t have been his own, and yet couldn’t have been anyone else’s.

Hajime was in the room where he had watched Nanami die. Where someone who wasn’t him, but was him, had allowed her to bleed out in front of him, even though he was fully capable of saving her. His strongest memory of her, and it was of her using the last of her strength to say that she’d wanted to play games with him one more time. He never would’ve let her just die in front of him when he could’ve done something. 

But he had— or someone who had been sort of him, but really hadn’t been him at all had. Enoshima had killed her. 

Kamukura had watched it happen. Kamukura had allowed Nanami to die, and had barely felt anything beyond _interest_. Hajime remembered it, and it hurt, it hurt like a real physical pain in his chest, but it still didn’t hurt as badly as it should’ve, he thought, and that didn’t help the guilt he felt over Kamukura’s complacency. Shouldn’t it have hurt more? Did it even matter at this point, now that she was already dead? 

Hajime didn’t want to be Kamukura. He didn’t want to simply stand on the sidelines and callously observe the world. He didn’t want to make calculations and predictions and never really feel anything, unless you counted the overwhelming sense of ennui that pervaded every aspect of Kamukura’s life. 

Kamukura didn’t want to be Hajime, either. He didn’t want his actions to be controlled by the pull of irrational sensations. He didn’t want many things, but he knew that he wanted to be able to think and act logically, rather than on whims accompanying the scattered memories of a boy who was supposed to be dead. 

Kamukura had known the risks when he had entered the Neo-World Program. Had risked dying altogether, in fact. But it hadn’t bothered him then. Of course it hadn’t; very little did. 

But now, for some reason, it did bother him, all of the sudden. It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t like the Neo-World Program could restore brain damage, so it shouldn’t have returned the ability to feel emotions to him. Kamukura couldn’t understand it. It simply didn’t make sense. 

Hajime wasn’t so sure that Kamukura had been completely emotionless, though, really. The little emotion that he’d seemed to feel had been denied and shoved down, sure, but there had been something there. Even boredom and interest were emotions, after all. 

Hajime found himself on a beach. He was the only one there. It was a beach he’d been on many times before, and one he’d already dreamed of that night; the beach on the first island of Jabberwock, where he’d first met his friends in the Neo-World Program.

Kamukura was the only one on a beach he’d been on once before. It was the beach on the first island of Jabberwock. It was both true and not that he had only been there once, because it had only once been him in mind, even if it was always him in body. 

They existed in the same place, simultaneously.

They existed parallel, both present at the same time, but never entirely touching.

They existed overlapping, two trains of thought at once that failed to align with each other, and yet both managed to make perfect sense.

He was falling, now, he realized. Falling from nothing, into nothing. But who was “he”? Hajime, or Izuru?

That had been the question on everyone’s minds when they had woken up from the Neo-World Program. The memory was still so vivid in his mind. The three survivors of the previous killing game cautiously looking him over before they had fully decided to trust him— well, Naegi had seemed to trust him somewhat almost instantly, but even he had still been wary. Even once they’d been satisfied, there had been the other survivors of the program.

“You don’t seem quite like you were in the program, but you’re also different than the person we knew before it— so which one are you now?”

It had been an unspoken question they didn’t want him to know they were asking. But he knew anyway, obviously. Kazuichi had been skittish around him, trying to avoid spending time with him if nobody else was around. That spoke volumes. Akane had almost asked him outright, before Fuyuhiko had interrupted and distracted her, and she’d let him. Which meant Fuyuhiko was too unsure of the answer to feel the question was safe, and Akane had felt someone had to ask it, but not entirely wanted to be the one to do so. Even Sonia, behind her mask of royal demeanor, had asked it. He might not have noticed that one if he wasn’t whatever Hope’s Peak Academy had made him into. But he had, and while he appreciated her attempts to get along with him regardless, it still kind of... hurt.

Kamukura had put them into a killing game, and they all had their own things to deal with besides. It wasn’t that he blamed them. But that didn’t make it any more pleasant to look around at the faces of his friends and see the one question that had been weighing on his mind reflecting back on every single one of their faces; who was he?

He had been Hajime Hinata. He had been Izuru Kamukura. Then he’d been Hajime Hinata again. Was he both now? Neither? 

His memories of being Hajime Hinata before the Kamukura Project were few and far between, and almost all were somewhat blurry. He could remember some faces. He could remember the ways he had felt. He could remember some of the things he had done. But none of it in much detail, and none of it as clearly as his memories seemed to form now.

Izuru Kamukura’s memories were crisp, clear, and in far more detail than Hajime’s had likely ever been. Some were harder for him to recall now that he’d woken up than others, but none of that had to do with how well he actually remembered. Hajime went to sleep and had Kamukura’s nightmares, sometimes, and they told him he was probably better off letting them come to him naturally than to try and force himself to remember. 

He wanted to be Hajime, not Kamukura, but he couldn’t just go back to the person he’d been before Hope’s Peak Academy. He couldn’t just ignore the person that he’d been after, and the things he’d done then, either. Even if it hadn’t been the person he’d been before, even if it hadn’t been the person he was now, he’d still done those things. It wasn’t like he could just ignore them and pretend they’d never happened. That wouldn’t be fair to anyone, and somehow he doubted it would really be of all that much help to himself. 

But even when they were able to accept that maybe he was both Hajime Hinata and Izuru Kamukura, he could still see his classmates trying to figure out if his actions were being controlled by a Hajime part of him, or a Kamukura part of him. Sometimes he thought he knew the answer. It was hard to tell, though. Sometimes he would do something that didn’t make sense for the person Hajime had been, and sometimes he’d do something that didn’t make sense for the person Izuru had been, and sometimes he’d do something that made sense for both of them, or neither of them. 

He wasn’t sure he really wanted to be one or the other. He just wanted to understand what was going on in his own head. He wanted to stop having to stop and question himself, to make sure that he wasn’t acting more like Kamukura than he was Hinata, to make sure that he didn’t revert into the person he’d been before. He didn’t want to revert to the Hajime Hinata he’d been before either! Hajime Hinata had been too unsure of himself to see that he was being manipulated and used by his high school as a human guinea pig until it was too late. 

He didn’t want to be Hajime Hinata, and he didn’t want to be Izuru Kamukura. So who did he want to be?

He thought about it for a moment as he fell through the abyss his mind had dropped him into. He felt like was back to where he had been before the Kamukura Project, in a sense. Which seemed logical enough, considering he was fairly certain he felt more like Hajime than Kamukura, most days.

So who did that make him? What was the answer to the question everyone had been asking?

He was Izuru Kamukura. He was Hajime Hinata. He was both of them, and neither of them, and each of them at separate intervals.

He wanted there to be a concrete answer. He wanted to be able to have a clear-cut idea of who he was. But it was like there were two separate trains of thought in his head, running at exactly the same time, and only sometimes intersecting. He didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t have to know. He would’ve liked to, of course— but maybe he didn’t have to. It was... a difficult idea to accept. He didn’t want to accept it, to resign himself to the hazy and confusing stew of thoughts and memories in his head. 

The idea of slowly sifting through them, of taking the time to identify and process each individual thought and memory— it didn’t feel like a satisfying conclusion. Not after all this flip-flop between identities, thoughts, memories, and actions. He wished he could’ve just skipped ahead to the end, where everything was sorted out, and it could all make sense again. But he couldn’t. Maybe there weren’t really any satisfying conclusions in real life. It was a depressing thought, for a moment. It also wasn’t; the idea of not having something to keep striving and working for seemed… well, boring. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t really sure how he felt, or who he was. Part of him hated that feeling of uncertainty, and the other was excited to see what would happen next; anything could happen next, after all.

He decided to focus on the latter sensation.

* * *

Hajime woke up to find himself sitting at a desk, in the cold metal building that housed the Neo-World Program. He lifted his head briefly to check that the students who had ‘died’ were still in their pods— they were, of course, but he’d wanted to be sure after that strange dream— and then put it back down to rest on top of his arm. He knew he ought to return to work on the computer in front of him, but he just couldn’t quite find the energy to. He’d rest for just a few more minutes, he decided, closing his eyes. And then the door to the room opened, and someone— he knew from the footsteps that it was Kazuichi, which was both perfectly normal, and unfathomably bizarre, at the same time— took a few steps in.

“Uh, Hajime? Oh, man, are you asleep? I can come back later— no, wait, isn’t it like, bad to sleep like that? Probably, right? Yeah, that sounds right.” It was, unfortunately. Being half-asleep meant that Hajime was just a little too tired to care, though. Kazuichi’s tentative approach indicated that he did not quite feel the same. “Hey, uh... Hajime...? I don’t wanna wake you up or anything, but, uh...” Kazuichi’s voice began to fade into the background as Hajime drifted steadily closer to sleep. 

For the briefest moment, Hajime felt something touch his shoulder.

Instantly, he was alert, and before he even knew what was going on, he found one of his hands was gripping Kazuichi’s wrist with enough force that it probably hurt. Hajime hurriedly let go— oops— as Kazuichi jumped backwards.

“Sorry! Sorry, I— I didn’t really— are you ok??” Hajime blurted out. 

“Ah, shit— Jesus, dude! Ow,” Kazuichi informed him, setting a plate Hajime hadn’t realized he’d been carrying just out of view, and rubbing his wrist where he’d been grabbed. 

“Sorry, I just— you startled me, I guess.” In hindsight, it had been a bad decision to ignore him. Also, it had been rude. It was also bad because it was rude, he reminded himself.

“Geez, man, you startled _me_ !” A nervous little laugh accompanied the words. “It’s ok, though, really. I’ll be fine. Oh! Right. You missed breakfast this morning—“ Hajime’s threateningly accurate internal clock told him _oh, shit, it was 2 p.m._ , “—and nobody’s really seen you outside of here since yesterday morning, y’know, so we were kinda worried about you. I figured you’d probably be here still, so I told the others I’d check in on you. I, uh, figured you were probably too absorbed in your work to be eating or anything, so I... brought you this.” Kazuichi handed him the plate he’d brought. There was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a small carton of orange juice that felt like something you’d find at a school cafeteria. The pink-haired boy looked somewhat sheepish about it. “I know you could do better, but I’m not really the best cook, so... yeah.” 

“...Thanks, Kazuichi. I... Thank you,” Hajime glanced away. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until just then. He felt bad that he’d made someone else take the time to help him, especially when he knew they were all struggling, but he was also so grateful to Kazuichi for it. He’d honestly thought... well, it wasn’t important.

“Hey man, it’s literally just a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It’s no big deal, really. It’s not like I had anything else to be doing.” They sat there in silence for a beat before Kazuichi continued, slightly softer. “I know it’s easy to get caught up in your work sometimes, but try to remember to take care of yourself, alright? Can’t get anything done if you exhaust yourself.” Hajime nodded. 

“Yeah, I know. I’ll try.” He got a sharp-toothed grin in return. 

“Cool. Cool! I’m uh, gonna go now, but lemme know if I can ever lend you a hand! And take care of yourself!” 

“I will. Thanks, Kazuichi.” Hajime realized he was smiling slightly as the other boy left. He’d probably apologize to everyone later for worrying them, but... he’d been kind of worried they hated him since the Neo-World Program, honestly. He’d known they’d probably forgive him on a logical level, but on an emotional level, he was still so relieved to be able to look back and say he’d been stupid on this one. He didn’t know what he’d do without his friends. Which reminded him— he probably wasn’t going to be falling back to sleep anytime soon, which meant he had work to do. The dark monitor in front of him reflected his own face back at him as it was now; one eye green, the other red, and a head of short, black, and spikey hair. He moved to turn it on, and then amended his previous statement after a sharp pang of hunger. He had work to do... after he ate. 

He took a bite of the sandwich Kazuichi had made for him. It was almost impressively mediocre, and exactly what he had expected it to be.

But it was food, and it had been made by someone who cared about him, despite some of his rather major fuck-ups, and that made it special, somehow. Even if Kazuichi and the others didn’t fully understand or forgive him, they were still his friends, it seemed.

He finished eating quickly, and made a mental note to make sure he ate an actual meal later. He was going to make sure to take better care of himself. Later. 

For now, he was going to work on getting the rest of his friends back.


End file.
